Sunday, May 11, 2014

Battle Reporters - The Fourth Faction

What's a wargamer to do while recovering from hip replacement surgery? Catch up on all their favourite wargame channels and blogs, including this esteemed journal, of course.

While watching a video pod cast from Long Island Wargaming they talked about different kinds of gamers. Now in my day there were two types of gamers, Win at all costs and Fluff bunnies. Now the conversation seems to have gotten more sophisticated with new types of gamers emerging from behind their consoles and go down their evolutionary branches.

The four subspecies of gamers now seem to be:

Tournament gamers - the old WAAC gamers - people that go to tournaments to win the event

Social gamers - people that go to tournaments for the social interaction and to play new people

Aesthetics - people into the background of the game including the painting enthusiasts but with the added restriction of being consistent to the background. No armies painted up like beach boys with Hawaiian Shorts.

Battle reporters - People who enjoy making video logs of their battles to the extent that they change their play style or tactical decisions to make for a better story in the game.

Battle reporters don't seem to have made it to NZ yet in significant numbers so do people think we will see more of this in the near future or are New Zealanders too staunch to publish their battles on the net?

What faction or blend of factions do people see themselves or have I got my pain medications set too high and I am completely off my rocker?

14 comments:

Id put myself down as a 'Social gamer' Playing with my mates is what keeps me fanatic about the hobby. But like all us id consider myself having a healthy blend of 'Tournament and Aesthetics mixed in vastly skewed toward tournaments WAAC but not at the detriment of loosing the Social & Aesthetics side.

I'm definately a social/aesthetic blend. I get trapped into thinking about story too much to ever field a true ly competitive army, and make tabletop decisions based on what I believe those characters would do rather than necessarily sensible choices. Now if only there were gaming events that I could win for being the grumpiest dwarf

Hey guys, check your gamer privilege :P Can someone please write up a break down of "gamer identity politics" and implications of intersectionality.

I write up the odd battle report and bounce between tournament gamer and social gamer. I have yet to read the fluff section of any wood elf armybook despite playing them since 2006. I saw "the Tree of Woe" on the map and that was good enough for me.

I think there is a difference between tournament gamers and WAAC. Tournament gamers want to be competitive, and losing while disappointing is accepted as being a way of getting better. WAAC has severe negative connotations which I as a regular tournament 40k player try not to be.

Unfortunately the allies rules for 40K ruined any aesthetic of the game and now in order to compete at an event you have to take some abomination of a Tau with something killer combo. That makes tournament gamer and WAAC gamer indistinguishable to me. To me an aesthetic / social gamer going to the event would take an army that looks like a battle company with some support. A tournament gamer would take terminators and shooting units and 2 5 man tactical squads to wave pompoms and claim objectives.A WAAC gamer takes Tigerius and centurions and the Tau special charactr that gives the whole lot stealth and then as many Riptides as possible.

I'm not sure people can always be firmly categorised. Once I am playing a game, I will generally play to win. However, when I'm making my army I'm generally not interest in fielding the strongest thing I can. I do enjoy the fluff, and I write battle reports. Where does this leave me...?

I agree, im more of a social gamer but leaning towards tournament gamer. I play with the guys in the garage most of the time and only make it to one or two tournaments a year but i typically play towards those tournaments and winning most of the time.

You may be correct in that this is not the CiF section of the Guardian, but all I'm reading is shades of grey in the comments...hence I stand by my original statement :P

Also I do tend to read the Fluff sections etc, I just havn't got around to reading the woodies. I assume they are in a forest, refused to come home when the High Elves asked, got it on with the forest and now they spend their time defending trees and stuff...along with tying Conan the Barbarian to the Tree of Woe.